Screentendo turns web pages into Mario levels you can play

Tired of staring at the same old, same old website all day long? Presuming, of course, that is part of your work. If so, and if you use a Mac, you might want to give this hack a spin. Probably inappropriately named Screentendo, this small open source program was designed to do one thing and one thing alone. It will turn any web page you set it on into a Mario level, which you can then use to while the hours away by playing until all the bricks are gone.

It may sound like magic, but it's actually not. Screentendo doesn't even actually modify the web page itself. Cue sighs of relief. Instead, Screentendo actually runs as a translucent window that you then resize and place over any web page or a part of it. When you click inside the window, it will overlay Super Mario bricks on top of colored, solid images, fonts, or whatnot. It then colors the rest of the window with that popular purplish hue. After a while, Mario himself appears to signal that the fun can begin.

OK, it does sound like magic, and unless you are a programmer, it probably is. The "magic" here refers to the image processing involved. The program basically analyzes the part of the screen occupied with the Screentendo window in order to determine which game elements to place and where, whether it should put in a brick instead of a sky tile.

Sadly, to do that, Screentendo utilizes a library called CocoaPods. Programmers in the audience would know that this hints that the program uses functionality specific to Mac OS X only. As such, it's utterly unusable on any other operating system. That said, the source code is available on GitHub for those who want to take a whack at porting it elsewhere.

Screentendo is the brainchild of programmer Aaron Randall from London. His motives for the hack was the very same eye-straining boredom of staring at screens. Taking advantage of his workplace's hackaday, he quickly cooked up this program to add another layer of insanity to an already insane situation.

VIA: Daily Mail